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March 06, 2007

Pre-Columbian and World Archeology from the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University

ARTstor has reached an agreement with the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, through which ARTstor will distribute digital images related to Pre-Columbian archaeology, as well as images of Pre-Columbian, African, Native North American, and Oceanic objects from the museum's collections. Approximately 55,000 images are from the photographic archives of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) which document early archaeological excavations throughout Central America. ARTstor will also distribute up to 90,000 digital images of the Peabody Museum's remarkable collections of archaeological artifacts and art objects.

Collaborative
Agreement Reached Between the Art and Art History Department of the
University of Texas at Austin, and ARTstor: Ferguson/Royce Archive of
Pre-Columbian Photography

ARTstor and the Art and Art History Department at The University of
Texas at Austin are pleased to announce that they will collaborate to
digitize and distribute the Ferguson/Royce Archive. The Ferguson/Royce
Archive consists of approximately 5,200 negatives, created by William
Ferguson and John Q. Royce and depicting views of Mesoamerican and
Southwest United States sites. William Ferguson and John Q. Royce were
amateur archaeologists and aviators who devoted themselves to
documenting from the air the major Pre-Columbian ruins. Their
photography is best known from publications they authored, together or
individually. These books include: Maya Ruins in Central America
in color: Tikal, Copan, and Quirigua, 1984; Maya ruins of Mexico in
color: Palenque, Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil, Xlapak, Labná, Chichén Itzá,
Cobá, Tulum, 1977; Anasazi ruins of the Southwest in Color, 1991; The
Anasazi of Mesa Verde and the Four Corners, 1996; and Mesoamerica's
Ancient Cities: Aerial Views of Pre-Columbian Ruins in Mexico,
Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, 1990.

The Ferguson/Royce Archive represents a photographic portrayal of
many of the major Pre-Columbian sites in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and
Honduras. Magnificent aerial views, as well as ground photographs,
provide glimpses of these ancient cities rarely seen by most visitors,
often capturing vistas that preserve specific moments in the history of
the discovery and excavation of these sites.

Dr. Julia Guernsey, who teaches Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican Art at UT
Austin and is a frequent user of the Ferguson/Royce Archive, attests to
the importance of this collaboration. "The Ferguson/Royce archive is a
rich resource for students and scholars, as it provides rare views of
sites and monuments, many of which would be impossible to duplicate
today. Having the resource available online in a digitized form through
ARTstor will be invaluable for both research and teaching." Max Marmor,
ARTstor's Director of Collection Development, adds: "Our partnership
with the Art and Art History Department at The University of Texas at
Austin will significantly advance ARTstor's effort to provide a rich
body of images of Pre-Columbian art and archaeology, for use by
teachers, students and scholars. This is one of several important
ARTstor projects involving the rich collections of The University of
Texas at Austin.

March 05, 2007

The field of anthropology lost a leading figure with the passing, on
Friday, March 2nd, of William C. Sturtevant, Curator of Ethnology at
the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution ...

Published by the Smithsonian, the
handbook is a major multi-volume reference work summarizing
anthropological, linguistic and historical knowledge about native
peoples north of Mexico. Bearing the imprint of its editor, the
thoroughness of the handbook has made it the essential resource for
those interested in Native American societies.

February 13, 2007

This conference seeks to bring attention to Pacific collection materials that are not well known but that have special value to Pacific communities and to the general public. It also seeks to focus attention on issues and developments regarding access to these materials, as well as to digitizing projects underway. An international group of Pacific librarians will share information about their collections and discuss common concerns.

The keynote speaker for the conference is award-winning poet, author, and former librarian Robert Sullivan, a UHM assistant professor of English. Other featured speakers include David Kukutai Jones, Maori specialist at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand; and Ewan Maidment, Executive Officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Canberra, Australia. The conference convener is Dr Karen Peacock, UHM Pacific curator and head of Special Collections.

December 23, 2006

The content on goldwaterlibrary.org constantly changes -- blogs added to the blogroll, the sidebars rearranged, new features added -- often and usually without comment. Only the most compulsive among its readers will notice the change from one visit to another.

So when I stumbled the full text of an early (1949) article on African art in a new-to-me blog, African Painters, my first impulse was to add it to the blogroll and move on. An explanation by its moderator, Joe Pollitt, of what he's up to comes from his blog's box-out:

Here is a blog about contemporary art on and off the continent of
Africa. To push forward the concept of African cultural development I
have created this blog but more importantly than that it's a place
where we can blow-off steam and discuss the impossible task of defining
a continent.

Judging from its archives the UK-based blog has been available since May 2006.

In an effort to find some biographical information on Pollitt to fill out this post, I ran across Stanford University Library's exhaustive compilation, African Art on the Internet, which describes African Painters as

Contemporary art from African artists worldwide. The majority of the artists are from West Africa especially from French speaking countries or francophone West Africa. Artist profiles and photographs, examples of work, reviews and commentary, tribute to Alexander Skunder Boghossian. Discussion forum.

For those Africanists unfamiliar with the SUL site, I strongly recommend a browse through. It includes a search engine that crosses all of its Africa pages (alas, not the 'art' page alone).

(As an aside, the blogging of an obscure, pre-blog treatise on African art reinforces my concerns about managing scholarly information appearing in the blogosphere -- which I discuss in my companion blog.)

November 06, 2006

The Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA) of the American Anthropological Association has recently announced the establishment of an interactive weblog to support the work of the journal of the same name and the field.

Found online at http://museumanthropology.blogspot.com, the Museum Anthropology blog will be updated with news of, and from, the field. Among its functions, the blog will fill the role formerly performed by the journal's Exhibitions Listings section. As museums provide the editorial office with press released and other information regarding new exhibitions, these materials will, when appropriate, be posted to the blog. The blow will also provide a space with which news related to the journal may be easily conveyed to the CMA membership as well as the general readership. As with other new media, this blog will surely change as technology and user practices shift. To begin with, the comments function will be enabled and we will experiment with strategies to promote professional dialogue on the subjects featured on the site.

The Museum Anthropology blog appears on the Goldwater Library blog in the Blogroll to the left of this post, under the heading MUSEUMS & CULTURE.

November 02, 2006

This month The Metropolitan Museum of Art announces the forthcoming release of The Art of Africa: A Resource for Educators, the latest in its continuing series of resources for educators. The resource was written by Christa Clarke, curator of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific at the Newark Museum.

The rich and diverse artistic heritage of sub-Saharan Africa is presented in forty traditional works inthe Metropolitan's collection. Included are a brief introduction and history of the continent, an explanation of the role of visual expression in Africa, descriptions of the form and function of the works, lesson plans, class activities, map, bibliography, and glossary. -- Publisher's notice

Publications include a variety of illustrations and descriptions of selected works of art, historical and cultural background, classroom applications in the form of lesson plans and activities, and other useful material. Each publication in this series represents just one part of a
packaged set that also includes slides, additional activity components, and a
CD-ROM.

The publication of this resource for educators is made possible by Mr. and Mrs. Marvin H. Schein.

To purchase a complete set, order by phone (800) 662-3397 or visit The
Met Store. One complimentary copy of each resource is available to every New
York City public school upon request. Please call (212) 288-7733 or email teach.resources@metmuseum.org. Copies will be available as soon as the resource kit is in stock.

September 06, 2006

As the blog you're reading has grown in coverage and complexity these last fifteen months, two threads have emerged: the one centering on the art and material culture represented by AAOA and the Goldwater Library; the other, issues surrounding museum library practices, including using socially networked software (such as blogs, wikis, &c.).

As the museum continues to grapple internally with issues surrounding the role of blogs in overall web content generation, it seems counter-intuitive for these issues to be treated solely within the blog itself and for what is under current policy a restricted audience. It's a discussion that would benefit greatly by being opened to a larger librarian and researcher audience. What's more, it might draw attention to the Goldwater Library blog as well as generate suggestions for refinements and improvements.

After prodding from my blog colleagues I inaugurated the library of primitive art blog to capture the 'meta'-discussion which the Goldwater Library blog has engendered. The primary authors of the Goldwater Library blog, namely Joy and Erika, have graciously agreed to participate in the LOPA blog as well.

I invite everyone to take a look for him- or herself. Please make allowances for its newness and the inexperience of its creator. And feel free to post comments or contact me directly with your thoughts.

August 25, 2006

CALPULALPAN, Mexico (Reuters) - Skeletons found at an unearthed site in Mexico show Aztecs captured, ritually sacrificed and partially ate several hundred people traveling with invading Spanish forces in 1520.

Skulls and bones from the Tecuaque archeological site near Mexico City show about 550 victims had their hearts ripped out by Aztec priests in ritual offerings, and were dismembered or had their bones boiled or scraped clean, experts say.

The findings support accounts of Aztecs capturing and killing a caravan of Spanish conquistadors and local men, women and children traveling with them in revenge for the murder of Cacamatzin, king of the Aztec empire's No. 2 city of Texcoco.

Experts say the discovery proves some Aztecs did resist the conquistadors led by explorer Hernan Cortes, even though history books say most welcomed the white-skinned horsemen in the belief they were returning Aztec gods.

"This is the first place that has so much evidence there was resistance to the conquest," said archeologist Enrique Martinez, director of the dig at Calpulalpan in Tlaxcala state, near Texcoco.

It's hard to review an exhibition of 150,000 items. But visitors who enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Fifth Avenue, turn left past the Brobdingnagian flower vases in the Great Hall, pass through the impressive white musculature in the Greek gallery, take an elevator to the mezzanine, and navigate through a series of corridors with Sheet rock walls screening off construction projects, will arrive at an oasis of quiet, the Robert Goldwater Library, that houses the Photograph Study Collection of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. About the only photograph on display is a portrait of Goldwater, but there are treasures in the filing cabinets and storage drawers, and they are available to the public.

Robert Goldwater (1907–73) was an art historian who headed the Museum of Primitive Art. The museum, which between 1957 and 1974 was located in two townhouses on West 54th Street, was one of the first to display artifacts such as masks, statues, ceremonial drums, and fetishes as "works of art," and Goldwater was an important interpreter of them. The Photograph Study Collection was begun there and transferred to the Metropolitan when Nelson Rockefeller, who had founded the Museum of Primitive Art, offered it to the larger institution. Virginia-Lee Webb, the current research curator, tends the collection, as she has for 30-odd years.

The Photograph Study Collection was established as a research center for art historians and ethnologists. It includes original prints from the 19th through the 21st centuries, negatives, copies of prints in other collections, books, and reference works, and can provide access to material at other institutions. Today the collection is also an important resource for artists interested in indigenous arts. And it serves as well the curious, like me, who just happen to wander in.The experience of looking at photographs at a table in the room reserved for the library's visitors is quite different from seeing them hanging on a wall in a public gallery. There is a sense of intimacy that comes with being able to handle the objects and scrutinize them at great leisure — from being pretty much alone with them.

As an introduction to the collection, Ms. Webb brought me some of her favorite photographs, along with a pair of the disposable white cotton gloves that are to handlers of vintage photographs what disposable latex gloves are to food preparers. The first was a picture of Antsahatsiroa, Madagascar, (1862–65), taken by William Ellis, an albumen print from a collodion negative, 7 1/2 inches by 6 1/2 inches. Ellis was a British missionary who was taught photography by Roger Fenton, one of its most important practitioners in mid-19th century England. The collodion negative was state-of-the art technology that in conjunction with the albumen print produced a warm, sepia-toned image, rich in detail and the illusion of depth. The print is mounted in a heavy mat; the top corners are rounded, a Victorian touch.

Antsahatsiroa is situated on a hill: The top half of the photograph is taken up with structures built in a set style, the lower half with a crowd of natives distributed on a series of terraces. Poring over the picture, I noticed many details: the steeply sloped roofs with their front and back frames extending upward to form Xs, the second-floor balconies that surround the larger buildings and are typical of French colonial architecture, and the immobile figures wrapped in white, gray, and black robes, their heads featureless globes dotting the hillside.To me it is a work of considerable charm, touched with the romance of distant places and times. And an ethnographer might see even more.

Next to be placed in front of me was a selection of prints from the 477 images Walker Evans took in 1935 to document an exhibition of African sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. Evans must have had a great deal of feeling for these objects because he was able to invest them with considerable personality.The item with library catalog number 1978.412.2145 is the head of an ancestral figure from the Fang people in Gabon, a gelatin silver print, 9 1/4 inches by 5 7/8 inches, mounted on dark tan paper and kept in a plastic sleeve. The light Evans played on the shiny forehead, nose, and chin of this sculpture, and his tight cropping, give a sense of the original, which is also at the Met. In 2000, 50 of Evans's photographs got the attention they deserve when they were displayed at the Museum in "Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art."

Evans's study of the Fang head and Ellis's picture of Antsahatsiroa are examples of the two main types of images in the Photograph Study Collection: that is, either objects seen as works of art or location shots of the indigenous makers of these objects. There are also series of pictures in which craftsmen are shown making an object; the object is then seen in its native context, and finally in isolation, or even in the museum. And Evans is not the only famous photographer with work in the collection. There is a picture of a figure from a Papuan housepost that Man Ray took around 1929. There are pictures of many different African peoples by Eliot Elisofon, an artist well-known to subscribers of Life magazine in its heyday. And there are portraits by African commercial photographers like Seydou Keïta of Mali who are just now coming to be appreciated in their own right.

But the pride of the collection is its extensive holdings by great ethnographic photographers: Philip Dark's work on Benin art from western Africa and on the Kilenge, a people who live on the western end of the island of New Britain; Tobias Schneebaum's studies of the Osmat Asmat people of New Guinea; Anthony Fordge Forge's work, also of New Guinea; Paul Wirz's, again New Guinea; Paul Gebauer's record of Cameroon; MartinChombiChambi's Machu Picchu in Peru.The Getty Grant Foundation has provided funds to digitalize much of the collection: By the end of 2007, Ms. Webb expects 60,000 images will be available on line.